Agency at the time of the Anthropocene

In an academic setting such as this symposium, I don’t need to review with you those new emotions with which the Earth is now agitated in addition to its usual motions. Nor do I need to explain why facts of geology have become news and why a piece of information about Charles David Keeling’s data at Mauna Loa has shifted from the “science and technology section” of the newspaper to a new section reserved for the damning tragedies of the Earth. We all agree that, far from being a Galilean body stripped of any other movements than that of billiard balls, the Earth has now taken back all the characters of a full-fledged actor. Indeed, as Chakrabarty has proposed to say, it has become once again an agent of history, or rather, an agent of what I have proposed to call our common geostory.